Poet Yone Noguchi, more famously as known as the father of acclaimed artist Isamu Noguchi, enmeshed himself in several duplicitous affairs at the turn of the century. As Yone wrote passionate letters of love to western writer Charles Warren Stoddard, he proposed marriage to Alabama’s first historian Ethel Armes and impregnated editor Léonie Gilmour. Private fantasies and frustrated intimacies attest to how even the most seemingly selfish acts of sexuality are bound up in socio-cultural norms.

Works in Progress

Discriminating Sex: White Leisure and the Making of the American "Oriental," book manuscript in press with University of Illinois Press.

In the late 1890s, middle class whites explored and expanded gender and sexual norms in unprecedented ways. In San Francisco divorce rates climbed, women were becoming mannish, and extramarital sex seemed unstoppable. Social critics protested the seeming chaos, projecting their moral fears on city Asians. Characterizations of Asians powerfully served as mirrors of shifting gender and sexuality among whites. They also seeded the beginnings of an pan-Asian American experience in the formation of a single imagined "Oriental." These representations underscored not only how discussions of morality are often racialized, but also how operations of gender and sexuality evocatively clarify the ubiquity of white privilege.